The soldier handling the material and those braced in the shafts bitched, though not loudly, about the heat and the strain. Kickaha could hear them plainly, but he supposed that the officers below could not.
At last, there were thirty-five bows, thirty-five quivers, and thirty-five swords, helmets, and chain mail suits piled on the floor. There were more soldiers than that in the hall when Kickaha had first seen the invaders, so it seemed that a number was going to stay below. Among them would be all the officers, who did not want to take the time and trouble to remove their steel plates and chain. From the shouted conversation between the man in the tunnel above and an officer below—which could have been done quietly if the men in the shaft had relayed the messages—the man in the tunnel was a noncom, a shlikrum, an aboriginal word borrowed by the medieval Ger-
A PRIVATE COSMOS
27
man conquerors from Earth to indicate a master sergeant.
Kickaha listened carefully, hoping to find out if any men were climbing up other shafts—he did not want to be trapped or jumped on from the rear. Nothing was said about other climbers, but this did not mean that there were none. Kickaha kept looking behind him, like a bird watching for cats, but he saw and heard nothing. The shlikrum should have been as nervously vigilant as he, but apparently he felt that he was safe.
That feeling evaporated like a glass of water in a vacuum. The shlikrum had bent over to help the top man out of the shaft when Kickaha plunged his knife several inches into the man’s right buttock. The man screamed and then went headfirst into the hole, propelled by Kickaha’s foot. He fell on the man he was trying to hoist out; the two fell on the man below; and so on until ten men, shrieking, dropped out of the hole in the ceiling. They splud-ded on top of each other, the sounds of impact weakening as the layer of bodies increased. The shlikrum, who had fallen further than the others, landed sprawling on the uppermost body. Although he was hurt, he was not knocked out. He leaped up, lost his footing, and fell down the pile of bodies onto the floor. There he lay moaning.
An officer in a full suit of armor strode clanking to him and bent over a little to speak to him. Kickaha could not hear the words because of the uproar in the hallway, so he aimed an arrow at the officer. The angle was awkward, but he had trained himself to shoot from many angles, and he sent the arrow true. It penetrated the juncture of shoulder and neck plates and drove deep into the flesh. The knight fell forward and on the noncom.
28
A PRIVATE COSMOS
Kickaha was curious about the silvery casket strapped to the knight’s back, because he had never seen anything like it before. Now was not the time to indulge,his curiosity, however.
The soldiers who had been unpiling the bodies dropped their work and ran out of Kickaha’s sight. There was a babble of voices and then silence after an officer roared for it. Kickaha recognized von Turbat’s voice. It was only then that he began to realize the implications of this invasion and savage hunt for him.
Von Tlirbat was the king of the independent nation of Eggesheim, a mountainous country with perhaps sixty thousand citizens. At one time, as Baron Horst von Horstmann, Kickaha had had fairly amicable relations with him. After he had been defeated by Kickaha in a lancing joust and had then caught Kickaha making love to his daughter, von Turbat had been hostile. Not actively so, although he had made it plain that he would not be responsible for avenging Horstmann’s death, if someone should kill Horstmann while he was under von lurbat’s roof. Kickaha had taken off immediately after hearing this, and later, playing his role of robber baron, he had plundered a trade caravan on its way to Eggesheim. But circumstances had forced Kickaha to abandon his castle and identity and run for his life to this level. That had been afew years ago.